SSD

Unlike most external drives I've seen, the Silicon Power Armor A80 portable hard drive uses A-male-to-A-male USB 3.0 cable.

This means the drive will not work with the more popular type of USB cable, which has an A male port on one end and a (Micro) B male port on the other. More than making up for this, the new drive offers alpha male performance all the way.… Read more

SanDisk announced today its latest solid-state drive, the SanDisk Extreme.

The company says the new drive offers up to 10 times the speed of a 7,200rpm hard drive and will greatly improve the boot and shutdown time as well as overall performance of a computer.

According to SanDisk, the new SanDisk Extreme SSD delivers up to 83,000 maximum random write input/output operations per second (IOPS) and up to 44,000 random read IOPS. The drive also offers fast sequential read and write performance up to 550MBps and 520MBps, respectively. This means apart from improving a computer's … Read more

RunCore introduced the Pro V Max solid-state drive (SSD) at CES 2012 as one of its first standard SSDs for the U.S. market.

However, the company is not a new SSD vendor. In fact it describes itself as a major vendor that has been offering SSD storage products for other OEM hardware vendors.

This might be the reason why it's priced the Pro V Max at about $2 per gigabyte, comparatively high, to avoid immediate competition with its partners.… Read more

Intel announced today its latest consumer-grade solid-state drive, the Intel SSD 520 Series.

The new drive supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard, uses Intel's 25-nanometer (nm) NAND memory process technology, and is powered by an LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor with firmware that Intel co-defined and validated. Intel says the 520 Series will set new industry performance benchmarks for SSDs. … Read more

October 2008. I remember eagerly buying Apple's newly designed and sleekly beautiful unibody MacBook. My son, now 3 1/2, was just born. The last presidential election was just wrapping up. "Avatar" hadn't even come out yet. The iPhone was in its second iteration. The iPad was still a year and a half away.

A long time has passed since, yet the 13-inch MacBook Pro, in terms of just sheer design, has barely changed at all. Sure, under the hood it's a completely different computer: fast Intel processor, Thunderbolt, integrated long-life battery, better screen. Yet, I can line up that 2008 13-incher (then just known as the MacBook) next to the latest 13-inch Pro and most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference. … Read more

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have improved considerably over the years, to the point where they're now a highly preferable alternative to traditional hard drives.

Indeed, a good SSD is usually significantly faster, and it consumes less power--a big consideration for laptop users. Also, because it has no moving parts, it's much less susceptible to damage.

Alas, SSDs still cost quite a bit more than hard drives. But they're getting a bit cheaper all the time, and here's a prime example: Newegg has the Patriot Torqx 2 64GB internal SSD for $54.99 shipped. That's after redeeming … Read more

New year, new resolutions.

If one of your resolutions is to get a better computer so you can be happier with your life, I'd suggest you double down on exercising, or better yet add eating healthy to the list, because chances are your computer is working just fine.

What you need might just be a new internal storage device and your computer will be as good as new, or maybe even better. This is especially true if you have a system (be it a laptop or desktop, running Macs or Windows) that's 3 or 4 years old and uses an SATA hard drive as its main internal storage device. Most existing computers fit this category, by the way.… Read more

SSD technology as a replacement for conventional hard drives has been one of the biggest advancements in modern computing, allowing for massive speed improvements along with far less power usage.

Solid-state technology has been around for years in the form of flash drives and MP3 players, but only in the past 3 to 4 years has the technology taken off, allowing for larger storage devices to be developed.

While most people envision an SSD drive to be in the form factor of a 2.5-inch notebook drive, the technology is also available in a PCI-express card format that allows for … Read more

LAS VEGAS--If you haven't heard of solid-state drives made by RunCore, you're not alone. However, this doesn't necessarily mean the company is a little guy on the SSD block.

RunCore tried to prove just that here at CES 2012 by showing off SSDs in all imaginable designs, from a standard 2.5-inch drive to PCIe-based drives to proprietary drives for mobile devices.… Read more